Two Kingdoms 3: Shadow Court 2

[DoctorM]

TWO KINGDOMS 3: SHADOW COURT 2

This is (once more) something of a dramatis personae: a second set of character notes for my Two Kingdoms stories. Not long ago I read Hilary Mantel's "How to Play Wolf Hall", her advice for actors in the London stage production of "Wolf Hall",  and quite liked it. Its style gave me the opportunity to think about my own "Two Kingdoms" characters and also about the way I see the KK characters I've been using.  These are, mind you, working notes only, and I will be expanding them. As always, comments are invited and appreciated.

ARJENOL

Lionel Torval Bolomir Furstan d'Arjenol, later Festil d'Arjenol, Duke of Arjenol, later Archduke.

You are the Duke of Arjenol, the brother-in-law of the king of Torenth. You are born a Furstan of Arjenol, an heir to the southern line of the royal house.

Your father is the great friend and ally of the Marluk, and you grow up in the middle of the plans they spin out together in the eastern lands.  You show early promise both at steppe warfare and at a courtier's skills. 

You become duke young, and in 1107 you marry a daughter of Nimur II of Torenth. She is the sister of Wencit, who will become Wencit (or Wenzel) II. This is a marriage your father and uncles have worked for throughout your childhood. 

You attach yourself to the circle of Wencit's supporters, but find reasons to stay out of Beldour whenever you can. You stay largely in the Arjenol east, watching the maneuvering and plotting that begins late in King Nimur's reign and extends and deepens during the reign of Karól. In 1110 you are openly, dangerously, opposed to the accession of Wencit's nephew Aldred. You are not in Beldour for Aldred's assassination, but you arrive at the royal capital within days with a column of Arjenol horsemen and announce your support for Wencit.

You spend the next decade mostly in the east and south, rising to become Wencit's general for the east and his fixer. Your marriage is of course a matter of politics and dynastic interests, and you quietly use your talents to move your half-brothers and your sisters' husbands up in the world. You are the king's brother-in-law; this is no more than family duty.

Your wife will bear you six children, five of whom survive infancy.  Your wife Morag bears your children but is ultimately loyal to her brother and his party in Beldour. You never fail at any required marital duties, and your public treatment of Morag is always correct and coolly polite. Nonetheless, you keep separate households, and while you are always discreet, you make no secret of your other women, of whom there are many.

You are tall, slender of build, and darkly handsome. You have the dark hair and eyes of the Arjenol line. You read in several languages, and your rooms are furnished with an austere eastern elegance. You have the rare gift of making most of your ex-mistresses into friends. 

You are not yet nineteen when the Marluk dies. He has been your father's longstanding friend, and a long time ally of Arjenol. You offer your support to his young daughter, and  you become an acting older brother to her.  You will work behind the scenes with a few other Torenthi great lords to keep the crown from absorbing the Marluk and Tolan lands. You apply your influence to help ensure the collapse of the project to marry Charissa de Tolan to Aldred. 

In those same years you become a mentor and acting older brother to the young Christian-Richard de Falkenberg. The boy is the son of Lord Derek de Falkenberg, who commanded light horsemen for your father and the Marluk. You recognize the boy's intelligence and skills, and you put him to work learning how to be a captain of reconnaissance and how to survive at the Torenthi court. 

You are Deryni, and proud of it. Your real skills, though, are diplomatic and political— arts more arcane than any that Wencit or Rhydon of Eastmarch or the Marluk practice in their secret rooms.

At the end of 1119 you are summoned to Beldour and informed of Wencit's plans for a coming Torenthi invasion of Gwynedd. You are told to raise forces in the south and east and to bring in the support of the lords of Lorsol and Jandrich, who always require delicate handling. You begin the long, slow procedures for arming and feeding an army. You travel by horse and Portal from one great lord's court to the next, explaining Wencit's plans for the war to one noble after another, promising and cajoling. Your own political senses tell you to be skeptical of the war...and to consider certain unformed possibilities.

On Coronation Day at Rhemuth, you feed Arjenol troops into the city by Portal to support Charissa de Tolan's coup. Within weeks, horsemen you'd promised to Wencit are on their way across eastern Gwynedd to support the new queen. Your wife is despatched back to Wencit in Beldour under guard; you hold your children close. Your break with Wencit is sudden, unexpected, absolute.

Within a year, you are the Shadow Queen's ally and the central figure in the coalition forming against Wencit.  You join Charissa in rejecting the Furstan name. You are now a Festil of Arjenol, just as she is a Festil of Tolan. You proclaim yourself Archduke and begin to consider what a new Torenth might look like.

COLFORTH

Brennan de Colforth, later Lord Colforth of Avoine and Kenmure

In any painting of the Shadow Court, you would be painted just behind and to one side of the Shadow Queen, a quiet figure in military attire, always on guard, your eyes moving from the queen to the crowds and any doorway.

You are a Colforth of Tolan and Marluk. Your family have acquired the hereditary command of the Tolan ducal guard, and you are raised to do exactly that. You grow up learning about the procedures and protocols for guarding a ducal court, about who is or is not allowed with a blade's length of your lord.  You prefer a war hammer to a sword or a lance. By your late teens you know how to put down a riot, placate a drunken Torenthi prince, assemble a duke's riding court, search through a manor house for hidden threats. No one questions your courage or your loyalty to the Marluk's family.

Nothing in your life makes you more proud than commanding Charissa de Tolan's lifeguards.  From your childhood you are in love with Charissa de Tolan from a distance. You think no one knows this, and  no word of it ever passes your lips. Your feelings are a black jewel, a secret between you and God. You would die for Charissa de Tolan, and you would smash down anyone trying to harm her. 

You know that nothing will or can ever happen between you. The duchess— the queen, later —-treats you with absolute courtesy and kindness, with admiration for your professional skills. You are never allowed to be seen as ridiculous. Nothing is ever discussed between you, but you understand that sometimes some things are forever out of reach.  You can live with this. Your wife senses by instinct what you feel, and you spend much of your time trying futilely to make up to her for the  thoughts you hide.

On Coronation Day, you march with the Shadow Queen into Rhemuth Cathedral. You are sick at heart; you expect that you, Charissa, and all your men will die there. But you are determined to die at Charissa's side with dignity and pride. When Alaric Morgan strikes Christian de Falkenberg down in the coronation duel, you lead Tolan Guard into the Haldane troops and assembled lords. You and your men hold the cathedral until Tolan and Arjenol troops arrive.

You become Lord Colforth, and you understand that it is loyalty that has brought you up in the world.  Lands and titles come to you, but you choose to remain at the head of Tolan Guard so long as the Shadow Queen needs you.

AURELIAN

Marc-Friedrich Aurelian, lord of St.-Severin, later styled Duke of Carthmoor, Inquisitor of State.

You are the Grey Death. 

You have come from nowhere and become the slight, greying figure who sits at the center of the Shadow Queen's regime. The Shadow Queen brings her own network of intelligencers with her from Tolan, but you become her chief intelligencer and spymaster. You learn and master the administration of secret violence.

You come, as you always say, from a home city that is a maritime republic. Anything that can be broken down into procedures and processes is something you can learn and master. Financial accounting comes easily to you, as do languages and administration. The queen trusts you with her accounts and her secrets. At various points you will hold most of the high offices in the new order of things in Gwynedd.

Your family is from the urban patricianate. At twenty-two you are granted a life peerage in Bremagne, at St.-Severin in Finisterre. This is a prize for martial success: you and Christian de Falkenberg hold the Bremagni fortress of Shalmyr against a Moorish invasion. You wonder what your family would think of the title, or of you as a soldier.

You are a slight figure, just below medium height. You are Deryni, and from a city and a class where you have no need to hide this. Your enemies describe you as epicene, and there may be something of that in your face. You become a skilled horseman in steppe and desert styles, and you will always have a wiry strength. You are not a marrying man.

You leave your home city young. Explaining exactly why always eludes you. You are a younger son. The laws of inheritance in your home city guarantee that you will come into almost nothing. It is expected that you will be placed into law or banking, into a profession where your particular abilities will serve to make your fortune. You may leave to escape that. You may leave home to escape the city's attitudes about epicene young men who have no inclination to marry.

You sail north, become a caravan guard, and rise quickly to manage the finances of caravans for merchant houses trading out of the Moorish lands into R'Kassi and the Forcinn lands. At a caravanserai in Nur Hallaj, at a street stall selling manuscripts and maps, you meet Christian-Richard de Falkenberg. That chance conversation shapes your life. Very quickly you become Falkenberg's right hand, the quiet figure managing the Falcon Horse's finances and fighting in the endless local clashes between and inside the city-states.

Later, after the wars on the Moorish frontier in Bremagne, you go north and east with Christian.  The duke of Arjenol admires your skills. The duchess of Tolan comes to see you as her lover's shadow. In the autumn of 1120, you are the one who meets with Lionel of Arjenol and with Brennan de Colforth  and Charissa's Moorish guards to plot a way to save the duchess and bring off the coup on coronation day. You choose the archer who kills Ian Howell of Eastmarch, and you lead Falcon Horse troopers into the fighting in the cathedral. You also plan and order the great fires that devastate Rhemuth. After that night, you are most hated man in the city, and probably in all of Gwynedd. That will never change.

You hate waste,  and you have no personal taste for blood.  But you feel no moral qualms or physical revulsion at killing. You take Valoret for the new Shadow Queen with great bloodshed. This is only a tool. The taken city is soon restored to sullen normality and the business of state and life goes on. You become the Queen's Inquisitor of State. The title is one you import from your home city. You staff offices with quiet young men who can handle a stiletto or a quill with equal ease.

Your job is to confound the plots of Haldane loyalists, of Torenthi spies, of disloyal lords. You are good at this. You find torture inefficient as an intelligence tool, but you are willing to use it, and certainly willing to use it in public as a show of the fates of traitors and spies.

You stand at Christian's side when he marries Charissa.  That night, the Queen creates you her duke of Carthmoor. You use the title sparingly. Destroying Nigel Haldane and taking possession of the Carthmoor lands is something on your agenda, but this is not personal.  Taking Carthmoor from Duke Nigel is simply a political necessity. 

You have many enemies and rivals at court at Rhemuth and Valoret. You are an outsider and not of the high nobility. You keep your accounts immaculate and you keep away from any long-term possession of offices other than state Inquisitor. The great nobles dislike you on principle, but you are adroit at not giving them concrete grounds for jealousy.

You are patient, soft-spoken, tolerant. You are not religious, and you never understand why the kings of Gwynedd have not long ago brought the Church under state control. You see no reason for arrogance or public displays of emotion. Your personal tastes in food, wine, houses and furnishings are austere but expensive.

By the end of your twenties you are rich, and possibly the most powerful of the Queen's court.  You are Duke Lionel's friend in the East, and the Shadow Queen at Valoret trusts you and relies on you. 

You are the Grey Death, and in later centuries, historians will never know how to present you: the sociopathic enforcer of the Shadow Queen's tyranny or an early exponent of the administrative state and of social tolerance.

[revanne]

I love this.

[Jerusha]

This is wonderful.  I was hoping you would do Aurelian soon.   

[DoctorM]

I love this.

Merci! Much appreciated.

[DoctorM]

This is wonderful.  I was hoping you would do Aurelian soon.   

I must do more with him.

[DerynifanK]

Thank you for providing a more in depth picture of the characters and their motivations. Very well written and helpful.

[DoctorM]

Thank you for providing a more in depth picture of the characters and their motivations. Veryy well written and helpful.

Glad you liked it!